My Take | Beware of any escalatory rhetoric over South China Sea situation
- Trite tropes, metaphors and analogies used to describe what is going on may be more misleading and dangerous than apt or enlightening
Following Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Thatcher famously disdained the use of metaphor in political discourse. She believed politicians should be pragmatic and factual. But like the 17th century philosopher, her distrust of a rhetorical flourish didn’t stop her from turning to it when the need arose.
After all, Hobbes’ most famous work, Leviathan, used a biblical monster to stand for an absolutist government. Thatcher’s famous “the lady’s not for turning” was a clever play on “U-turn” commonly used by the news media, and which she promised she wouldn’t do in her neoliberal economic revolution then blamed for causing skyrocketing unemployment.
Besides being a metaphor, it was also a reference to The Lady’s Not for Burning, a then well-known play by the poet Christopher Fry about a witchcraft trial. My enemies and critics, Thatcher was telling them, you can forget about burning me or making me a scapegoat for your lack of direction and conviction.
Most politicians, democratic or authoritarian, however, have no qualms about using rhetorical devices to manipulate public opinion. These are often far more effective than outright lies.
A lie either convinces or it doesn’t. However, rhetorical devices such as metaphors, analogies and tropes, when they are well-crafted and effectively used, lead the targeted audience to reach the intended conclusion or conviction all by their own trains of thought, like well-laid rail tracks, to their predetermined destination. That is far more convincing in the long run.
Using one thing to stand for something else, which may otherwise be completely unrelated is how metaphors work. That’s why the mental and linguistic connections they make can be pedagogical and enlightening, or misleading and dangerous, depending on what that “something else” turns out to be.